 My name is Jason Moore, and it's my honor to introduce Esther Gocale. Esther is author of Eight Steps to a Pain-Free Back and Founder of the Gocale Method, and I'm proud to say that every time I drive my car, I sit on a, with my back propped up on a cushion that was designed by the Gocale Institute. Gocle, I apologize. See, I read it always on text, but many apologies, but without further ado, everybody, please a round of applause. This is a video that is only showing us still. It was taken in a Druze village in Israel, and the woman does hospitality. She serves apples and tea and a 20-course meal on the floor, and she puts everything there, and she lifts everything back, and she does all of it with her back in this shape. I call it hip-hinging. Her back is characteristically flat. From doing this all her life, she doesn't have to bend her knees very much anymore. Her hamstrings are really well stretched out. This is in the OR, Stanford Medical Center, and this is an anesthesiologist who has a very serious back problem and remarked to me that she looks forward to when she retires and won't have to bend anymore, which she's a young woman. It's a very low bar, and it's a very sad statement, not only of what we suffer in modern times, but also of our expectations to suffer and our sort of helplessness and hopelessness around this. So as some of you know, I spend a lot of time traveling and observing people in different cultures, bending. This is a Filipino man in San Francisco Airport, and he moves luggage, 17 years, no back problem, Africa, and what you notice that in a lot of places that are non-industrial, that have strong kinesthetic traditions that have been handed down from grandparents to parents and kids, that you see this hip-hinging, and this is India, again, on a boat in India, and this is in Italy, and I also look back in time to see, to look for different ways of bending, and this is a way that carries ancient wisdom in it, you could say, but along the way you also see different variants of this bending, and it all isn't always with a flat spine, and so this is, you can see in her low back, that there is some rounding, and on an anecdotal basis, I have found this to correlate with back pain, like this woman, complaints of back pain, and sometimes, so this is a variant, you see in Africa, a lot more among men, where there is a rather straight lumbar area, and then somewhere in the mid-back there might be a little bit of distortion, it seems to work without pathology, it doesn't seem to accompany, you know, it isn't accompanied by back pain. This is something I observed a lot in Brazil, so this is part of the African diaspora, and what I notice is like, there's a degradation of this old form of hip-hinging, you can see here that he is rounding his back, and he does it this way when he's doing light work, but when he's doing something heavier with cement here, you see that he returns to having a more proper hip-hinging form, and so it's really interesting to make these observations, and when you've taught movement as long as I have, you realize that it is a lot like a language, it's the language, it's like teaching other languages, in that you want to zoom in and zoom out, sometimes you focus on a point of grammar or a convention and spelling, and sometimes you zoom out and you memorize a poem, and you don't know what half the words mean, and you're learning a very different thing, and that's the way I have learned to teach effectively, efficiently, it's very similar in principles to language, and another similarity with language that I find very interesting is how degradation happens across time and across geographies. So for example, this bending form, this hip-hinging form seems to be a very fragile part of human movement, a little bit like the R sound, and I'm not an expert in this field, but you know how the R sound, when you move to different cultures, changes quite rapidly, you know, immigrants change their R side, R sound, and also in languages, so fried rice becomes fried lice, which actually on this, these kind of circles is maybe a good thing, right? And bending is like fragile in that form, in that sense, it changes, and there are consequences. This is very modern, this is a kid, a teenage kid, second generation, Mexican family, my gardener brought him along, you know, he wanted to earn some money, and he appeared and was helping with weeding, and here hip-hinging form has really fallen apart all over the place, as you can see. I tried to give them him lessons on how he might change, but this is not an easy thing to learn on the fly, it's something, you know, in the courses that we teach, we do in lesson four, we still first build a lot of components, a longer back, reshaped, a remodeled back, and then, and a strengthened back, and then you learn to maintain all of that length and shape and strength as you bend, as you hip hinge. So not a good first lesson, but a badly needed lesson, because this is where more problems happen than with anything else, and it turns out, in perusing the medical literature, that there is a web of connections between bending in the lumbar area and back pain and tight hamstrings, which is interesting and makes a lot of sense. If you look at someone who is round, round back bending, you can imagine, and you know, the causality isn't proven here by any means, but you can imagine that tight hamstrings prevent the pelvis from moving through its entire range of motion. It's impeded, it's held back, and therefore, the bending tends to happen higher up in the spine, and you can visualize almost the discs and the nerve roots and so on that are challenged in this kind of situation. Whereas, in this more traditional hip-hinging form, you can imagine that the discs and the nerve roots are as fine as if they were, you know, the architectures preserved, and therefore, if the original stack or form was good, it continues to be good through the hip hinge. So, my usual preoccupation is with teaching people how to improve themselves and how to do it quickly, and how to get out of pain, and how to live their full lives. But there are academic considerations which are interesting too. For example, now, why is this hip-hinging such a fragile thing? Because people do learn from each other, we are natural mimics, monkey see, monkey do is how we go about things, and so, yeah, once it has changed and people are rounding, then we copy each other, and so on, as is happening in today's society, in modern society, but it doesn't explain the trigger, like what would start people round-back bending. And the answer that I am playing with that I think makes sense is that it's a change in sitting form that is triggering the change in bending form, because sitting form is much more subject to fashion, it needs an implement of some sort, and so you are much more easily molded, you are much more vulnerable to what the norms of the day are and the thoughts, you know, the thinking of the day is. And so, to the extent that you are held in certain ways and given certain kinds of chairs to sit in, you are being informed, and not always wisely, to modify your sitting style, your ancestral sitting ways, and then my hunch is that that's the trigger. Once you modify your sitting posture, then you are set up for having modified bending posture. So here is what I would consider a more ancestral sitting way, this is in India, and this is another one, and there are numerous, there isn't a sitting way, a correct sitting way, the ancestral way, there are many many. This is how people sit in Village Africa. They have this L-shape, they cross their ankles, and they have the hamstring flexibility, and they're also cultivating, it goes both ways, to do this many hours a day. But people also sit on implements, tree stumps or rocks, or when, you know, for a job like this, you want to be elevated, and that would be a very routine thing to do as well. And this is, oh, I don't know what that was about. If someone can help me, rescue me from this color problem, that would be much appreciated. So, almost. Where was I? Here. And so what I'm showing, so while we are waiting for that to come, oh good. So this is, okay, stay in the light, and don't touch the black. South America, backstrap loom weaving, and you can see that it, she's sitting, I consider this also an ancestral style of sitting, and a healthy one, and it is in a chair, and she has, the characteristic is that her pelvis is antiverted. And one of the things that allows, if you can imagine, the hamstring muscle, it retains its normal length in this, as opposed to when the pelvis is tucked, where it loses its length. And this is on a bicycle, which certainly isn't an ancestral vehicle. You could, but the body is well adapted to sit on, in all sorts of things. So this too, with the pelvis antiverted, imagine the tail, an imaginary tail out behind is an easy way to think about this, and you can see that this, and this is even more modern on a little scooter. And again, this is, this includes an architecture that is healthy, and sustains good hamstring flexibility, and in my experience, that then preserves healthy bending form. So this is in Portugal, and we're talking people of all sizes, both genders, all ages. This is, it's very democratic, good posture, and bad posture. You find it in all kinds of sections of society. But if you have sat like this, then, in my experience, you are much more likely to bend well. Because you haven't let your hamstrings adapt to a short resting length. This guy is 82. He is a Portuguese. He runs a mill. He's a mill worker, and you see him sitting. To those of you who have trained eyes, you can see that his pelvis is out behind him as well, and he's repairing his own millstones, and here you see him bending, and you can see that same hip-hingeing form, and there is a correlation between that kind of healthy sitting and healthy hip-hingeing. This is Fausia from the first slide, the Druze woman, who unfortunately you can't see the movie version of this, but she's crossed, she sits cross-legged on the floor. This is what she's done her whole life, and she can do that in a healthy way. I don't recommend this to people who have gotten away from that for years, decades. You don't get that back easily, and in some cases not at all. Because of, you know, when you're born, this is all cartilage, and it ossifies in certain ways, and if you have been sitting on chairs and sitting on Western commodes to go to the toilet and such, then the hips don't come out the same way as if you, you know, many times a day we're squatting on a toilet and eating on the floor and such. But she, this is the way she sits. It's cross-legged on the floor with no help, and she does it perfectly. Her back is perfectly straight, and her bending is straight. And I want a word about sitting, because sitting has been much maligned in recent times, and I think overly so. I don't think it's sitting per se that is the new smoking, as you sometimes hear, and evil, and should be rooted out at all costs. I think it's the way people sit. Now, without a doubt, sitting eight hours at a stretch and, you know, is unhealthy, and one needs to get up and move and do various things, but people have been sitting for, from time immemorial, you know, cooking and tanning, and sitting is part of our heritage. I mean, need I say more? This is a scribe from ancient Egypt, and these people all sat, and in our more recent history, too, there are many, many examples of long hours of sitting. That didn't seem to result in musculoskeletal problems or other types of problems, and so I maintain, I'm convinced that it's not so much that people sit, but rather how they sit, that is the problem, but without a doubt, get up and move around and punctuate your sitting with movement. So this is a clerk who works from sun up to sun down six days a week, and it's not only in modern times that people work hard, but if what you're doing is tucking your pelvis, as you see me here on doing with my baby number one before I knew better, you know, and I'm kind of educating her pelvis in a poor fashion to tuck, you know, I'm not, I'm not, and if we continue to use this kind of baby furniture, then of course sitting is killing you. I mean, this is, this is doing all kinds of mischief with the organs and your physiological processes and your musculoskeletal system, and then after that, you know, if we put these kids who have been trained by our really poor baby furniture to be this way, and now we put them for hours and hours in school sitting and at digital devices, and this is what they're doing. It's really incredibly sad, and then of course that is the pattern that they learn, and now we continue to give them poor furniture. This was, I just, two weeks ago, I was in Portugal, and they have just changed all their furniture in the subways and so on to be conforming with our ideas. It's all this lumbar spine stuff, and I'll refer those of you who don't know my work about J-spine versus S-spine to look at my website, and I have other talks on YouTube where you can orient yourself in what I think the contour of a chair should be, but it isn't this, and if, you know, if that's the way you've been trained, and this is my husband before he knew, before he knew better, you're sitting on your tail, your imaginary tail, then, you know, then you are going to bend poorly, your hamstrings will be tight, your brain has learned a pattern of being round-backed, and that is what you are going to do, and then there are consequences. You are going to be bent out of shape. If, however, you have some knowledge of how the body works, so this is baby number two, and baby number two wasn't even supposed to be born because I was in such trouble with my back-off to baby number one, but that's another story, and I'll refer you to other sources for that, but baby number two, we knew how to position him to sit well, and here he is, you know, away from all the rather poor contours in the back of the thing, here he is showing his posture edge in the finals of a wrestling match that he won in the South Bay, and and he has continued to keep this form. In fact, this morning I have the great pleasure of watching the finals, Worlds, Ultimate Frisbee Championship played in Italy, and there was my boy in the winning team, the world champion. It was very thrilling, and then I was in Italy last week to watch my youngest daughter, who you see here, win for the US, the World Championship in the juniors, girls division, so they both have, I mean, I think they have an edge because I just don't think it's the genetics somehow. I don't think I've provided that, but they have, they move well, and they were carried well. By this time, we knew what we were doing, and so this is a prescription, you know, if you have young people in your life, influence them. It's simple things, the way they are carried, the way you handle them, the way you teach them the language of movement, you know, what is, what are the components of movement? You don't want to teach them this, and you don't want to teach them this. You know, this is not part of the normal vocabulary of movement, and you can guide that. You are training their brains, setting their neural pathways. By the time we had baby number three, I knew even more, you know, each baby learned something, and this sitting pan that you see, this is an African technique that's awesome. This is when they're beginning to sit, and you sit them in this bowl, and then you stuff them with all kinds of stuff around. So it becomes like a mold, and it's an age where they're usually frustrated, and they're, you know, on their back flailing around, and wanting to be part of normal society, but physically unable to, and you provide them this mold, and they're happy as can be, and they are getting their backs all sorted out, you know, they're learning what it means to have good structure, and they're strengthening their legs against the side of the wash tubs, so they're getting stronger, so they don't fall as much when they start walking, and they're externally rotating their legs, which is another ingredient that you want to teach them, not just having their behind out behind them, and maintaining flexible hamstrings, a lot of ingredients to having normal human structure, and this to me is a really wise way that is very ubiquitous in Africa, and I recommend if you have little ones, you know, in the four, five month range, wanting to begin to sit, look this up, it's great. Another technique that I learned from my baby number two and three was carrying on the back, which to me was one of the best baby things I learned. It's the African style, simple piece of cloth, again, I'll refer you to YouTube and my website and other places where I teach this more formally, but I recommend learning a few ingredients to keep it safe for yourself and for your baby, you know, so start with stuffed animals, and learn to hip hinge, learn to lengthen, reshape, strengthen, it does all go together, but I'm working in my garden here, and she is getting her hips opened up, very, very important, you want the legs externally rotated, that is sets the possible, the stage for the torso being able to nest between the legs, otherwise it gets stuck, and there comes a point where you are then forced to round back bend, and this is baby number, her older sister carrying her, and that's all part of what you want to happen, you want, it's good for all parties, you know, she is preparing to, for when she has her own baby, she'll be a, you know, little expert, and young, and it establishes a really good bond between them, actually they both were on Stanford women's frisbee team, they're like this together, all my kids went into frisbee, now I'm thinking I need to learn, so all kinds of good things happening physically, emotionally, you know, very, and safe, so I was talking about how you want your legs externally rotated, so there's room for your belly, in the case of a baby, or a pregnant woman, or someone who has a little extra weight, but also your bones, your entire torso needs passage, if your legs are turned in there isn't the same passage to really allow the pelvis to nest, and so that is one of the ingredients that you want, so that your back can retain its original shape, so other prescriptive things are to encourage your kids, and the kids in your life, and yourself, to do activities that encourage good posture, if you go back a hundred years, any dance form, or exercise form would have this kind of wisdom, packaged into it, you know, so football for example, if you think about the power position, it's a hip hinge, and that's because football was invented more than a hundred years ago, where people still knew how to bend, and so within the realm of that sport, this healthy form has gotten codified, and passed down, and it's stable, and so you can avail yourself of that benefit, you can kind of revisit old times if you will, by learning these old sports, or sports that were established a while ago, or old dance forms, or any old fashioned kind of activity, another thing that I think is very important to do is provide yourself and your children healthy furniture, like why, if we are going to sit and we are, no matter what we think about it, travel, involve sitting, and rest, you can't go to the restaurant and bring your treadmill desk, and whatever else you have in mind, so it's going to be in your life, and then you need to have furniture that's conducive, and that includes, this is chair, this is a mini version of the chair that we've designed, that I actually, I pride myself in having only two products, I guess there are three now, there's a head cushion too, but a chair, and a cushion, if you don't want to get a chair, then transform whatever chair you have into a decent chair by adding the right kind of traction, possibilities, and there's plenty on YouTube about that, so you can, and on my website, you can look that up, but you want to predispose the pelvis, to tip forward, and you want to do it in a healthy fashion, and you want to provide an option for how much, because it really depends on where you are right now, so the way I designed the chair was it's flat, it's flat, and then it has curvature, different curvature, different points in the front half of it, so depending on how far out you sit, you are getting more anti-version in your pelvis, and you find the place that feels right for you, and the rest of you stacks well, so this is important as well, and then actively like pay attention to your own bending, I do a lot of bending because I teach people things on the ground, that's me helping someone with stretch lying on the side, which is a really good way to learn to get your behind out behind you, and come out of any kind of fetal shape that you might have gotten accustomed to lying in, this is our teacher Joanna, and you're just seeing a freeze frame of a video, sorry, but she pinches very nicely, she's in Portland, and that brings me to another piece of this, which is do yourself a huge favor and actually do some training, because though none of this is rocket science, it isn't trivial either, it is nuanced, and you can learn a lot from a book, our book, my book has over 1100 images, step by step, and you can learn very valuable things from there, but there is a limit, and most people are visual, so we have a DVD as well, and that helps you learn more, but ultimately if you are learning a kinesthetic thing, like if you want to learn how to play tennis, or how to learn golf, you wouldn't dream of learning it all from a book, and there is value in having a coach and a teacher give you feedback, give you hands on guidance, give you a more nuanced understanding of what you need to do, and also take you places which just feel strange, because you haven't been there in a few decades, so even if it is natural, it feels so weird, we have a lot of people who say, oh my goodness, I remember your quote Sarah, do you remember, do you mind saying? That's what you said, I remember, and a lot of people say that, it's like, okay, are my knuckles touching the floor already? You feel odd, because even though it is an odd, and then it takes a mirror to see yourself and realize, wait a minute, this looks totally different than it feels, and to go through that passage, it's very helpful to have guidance, so that's my invitation to all of you, is to do yourself a favor, we do a lot of stuff free online, every month we have free online classes, we have numerous of them, and we do stuff, we have stuff on YouTube, we are here, our mission is to really change the world, to change everyone around you, so they are reflecting to you what you need to do, because that's the way it's happening in village Africa, people are copying each other and they have really good models to copy, so I need to give each of you good models, so you are all influencing each other positively, so we have to get to that threshold amount of good posture around you, so that it starts spiraling in a good direction, it takes a lot of work to get to that threshold level, so we actually have, if we should circulate, we have like a newsletter, if someone can create a page and circulate that, then you can keep in touch, and we can inform you of our stuff, and let me end with a little lesson, and I'm going to invite you to scooch to the front of your chair, if you have a back problem, if you have a disc problem, so I recommend you don't follow along, you can touch base with me after and I'll give you more individualized attention, okay, but otherwise you can come scooch so that you're almost tipping over the front edge, you're kind of like, your sit-spons are hooked onto the edge of the chair, your knees are maybe a little low and open, it does help to have your knees facing out, there's a little technique we call kidney bean shaping the foot, it's not that you want your foot to be facing way out or really wide, although until you learn this kidney bean shaping maneuver, it might be helpful to widen your legs and have your feet face out a little bit, and now for safety, make yourself a little extra tall, you won't have to do this once you have good length and good shape in your back, but for now, create length and a little better shape by just engaging whatever muscles you can recruit to make yourself a little taller, a little stronger, a little flatter through your spine, and now you are going to try to hinge just a teeny bit in one piece, so the only place that's going to be moving is your hip joint, so it's going to look like this, and you want to determine that it really isn't round back bending that you're doing, and the best way to determine that is to use your fingertips on your spine, so you can go side to side, you can go up and down, ideally you would find a shallow groove, if not a very deep groove, and neither bones sticking out, but do the best you can with what you've got, make yourself super tall, and now you are going to very slowly bend forward, staying super tall, and the moment you feel your groove is changing on you back up, okay, you don't want it to disappear, and you don't want it to get kind of angry deep, so you are hinging at the hip and nothing changes in your back, and then you come back up, so you've got your legs open, if you know kidney bean shaping of the feet too, open up your legs, that's great, and now you are just hinging your entire torso a little bit, and get feedback from your fingertips on how you're doing, and then when you get very good at this and you're very comfortable with this, you can refer to the book and learn how to implement more, and maybe understanding, although I recommend that you proceed all of that by really lengthening and shaping your spine. If anybody would like to have me check their form or touch base with me about what's going on with your body, I'm going to be around and I'll be very glad to assist people, but let me take some questions, please. Microphone. I think to be said about I was trained to sit with my feet flat on the floor, not to have crossed the legs that my posture would be improved if that's how I was training myself to sit, true or false? Really short answer, false. But a little expanded, we have human beings have a taste for symmetry, and where did all these rules come about that this should be 90 degrees and the feet should be this way and they should face straight ahead, and I don't know the basis. You see my collection of images and I have tens of thousands of them, and I have yet to find one population of the type I'm describing that has their feet straight out ahead, certainly never in, and that says that your feet, no, they do all kinds of things with their legs. This is perfectly good posture as far as I'm concerned. As long as your pelvis and your spine remain well stacked, that's where it's at. Your legs and arms are made to do anything you like. Esther, I'm wondering when you're sitting that way, what do you do to counteract the tightness in the muscles here in the back? So if it's habitual tightness, you may not have everything you need to just instantly make that go away, but you want to make sure that you are not trying to sit up straight and stand up straight in the most common ways, that being like chest out, chin up, chest out, the kind of old fashioned approach that A doesn't work because you have to remember it to do that all the time, and B, I don't think it's so healthy because it compresses. Every time you're arching your back, it compresses things. So first of all, you have to get rid of this idea that you have to sit up straight and make a huge effort ongoing to have this so-called good posture. But then it also helps to settle your pelvis well. That gives the possibility to have a well stacked spine without a lot of muscle tension. Then it helps to breathe deeply enough so that you're actually massaging your spine with every breath you take. So there are a lot of ingredients. But start with the idea like, okay, every bone in my body has a best place to be somewhere in the field of gravity. I was not born with the user's manual, but I can intuit this somewhere deep in me as knowledge about how I'm supposed to be put together. And there are populations, fewer and further between, that can guide me in this. And even teachers, who know the lay of the land a little bit, so can guide me. And pictures, so start to figure it out because it is unnatural to just have your muscles all tense. It's solvable. Thank you. We don't have any more time for questions. Everybody, please round of applause for Esther.